Devious - Lisa Jackson [115]
There was a knock on the open door, and the receptionist with the frizzy blue hair poked her head in. “I’m sorry, Sister, but there’s someone here to see you . . . Oh!” Her eyes rounded at the sight of Montoya as he and the reverend mother entered through a small back doorway.
“Thank you, Eileen. Detective Montoya and I are almost finished.”
“Detective?” Her graying brows drew together behind the glasses that made her eyes appear owlish. “But the man who’s here says he’s—”
Montoya’s partner, the heavier-set fellow, appeared behind Eileen.
“It’s all right,” Charity said, waving him inside. “I think I need to talk to both detectives.”
Eileen had shifted slightly and Bentz entered.
“Please, close the door,” Charity said to Eileen, and as it closed, she motioned to the two chairs facing her desk. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she said, finally ready to unburden herself. “You see, I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
CHAPTER 36
“It’s as if I didn’t even know her,” Valerie said as they walked into the mausoleum. Slade’s boots rang against the polished marble floors, and, as always when she visited here, Val felt cold, her skin chilling as if the ghosts of the dead haunted the wide hallways of the mausoleum where the ceilings rose twenty feet and the walls were polished stone. Tall windows on either end of the edifice let in natural light, today a filtered sun. She had the feeling she was walking through a long tunnel, the walls of which were inhabited by the dead.
Her parents’ ashes were sealed here, on the east wall, along with dozens of others who had died. Gene Richard Renard and his wife, Nadine Lynne Bates Renard, held permanent residence in a vault on the fifth row from the bottom in a wall of veined marble.
Val ran her fingers over the etched letters while Slade leaned against a tall ladder that was used to reach the higher spaces. She’d come here often after they’d died, first her father of throat cancer and less than two years later, her mother of a brain aneurysm, just after Christmas, the very year that Camille decided to live with Val and Slade in Texas for a while, then left to join the convent. Though Gene had been nearly seventy when he died, Nadine had been much younger, only fifty-eight when she’d died. Val had sometimes wondered if the aneurysm had been caused by the stress her daughters had put Nadine through, though every doctor she’d talked to had dissuaded her of the idea.
God, that was a bad time for all of them.
Val shook off the memory and said, “I mean . . . it’s almost like Camille was two people. Or . . . something.”
“A split personality?” Slade asked, but she shook her head.
“No, not really. I’ve heard that people have public lives and personal lives and private lives. Everyone sees the public life, the family and close friends are part of the personal life, and then there’s the secret life, the one no one but you knows about. Camille’s secret life, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Someone knew about it,” Slade pointed out, walking closer to her, touching her on the shoulder in a way that was intimate and caring—a bridge between them.
“Yeah, someone did.” Whoever she was sleeping with surely did, the man Cammie had referred to only as “Beloved.” Whoever the hell he was. Frank O’Toole? Or the unknown guy who had impregnated her.
If only Cammie had confided in her. Told Val about the other lover.
Maybe she thought the kid was fathered by Frank.
Sighing, Val studied her parents’ inscription. Gene and Nadine, names that rhymed. A joke between them. Her father had sworn that if she and Camille hadn’t already been named, he would have called her Valdine and Camille would have been Camdeen. He’d winked as he’d said it, and Val had rolled her eyes.
They’d been good parents. Gene, a welder who worked for the railroad and Nadine a substitute teacher for the public schools, though they’d enrolled their daughters in St. Timothy’s.
“Doesn